A Number Of Small Things/Labels/Bureau B products

Tarwater - Inside The Ships from 16,99 €

"Inside The Ships" is the latest and the eleventh studio album by Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok. On board are eleven songs that reflect the different facets of the Tarwater sound cosmos: Dense soundscapes created by skillfully interweaving electronic and analogue sounds. When the duo began working on the new album over two years ago, they initially intended to create a Space Opera. That was not to be, but the resulting visions of the future, fictional knowledge and the distant and unknown served as the inspiration for these songs. Yet despite titles like "Inside the Ships", "Radio War" or "Do the Oz", this is not a concept album.
Tarwater have always befuddled the fanatics of stringent categorization among pop analysts. The synesthesia produced upon hearing the new album - seeing alien worlds by means of acoustic stimuli - is deftly created by Jestram and Lippok in their own special way. They have dispensed with coldness and overtly technoid sounds. Science-fiction folklore remains sidelined. The "otherness" is produced, for example, through the use of brass (tuba, saxophone, horn, trumpet and trombone) and other instruments that are otherwise used far from the pop-context – such as the cimbalom. You really have to listen twice to distinguish the individual instruments. Even with these unusual elements, Tarwater's sound cosmos remains an organic whole and is immediately captivating on first listen. Tarwater's aesthetic defies categorization. While in the past the German press worked with the deliberately vague term "indietronics", their English counterparts like to associate the duo with a tradition directly linked to Krautrock.

Solyst - Solyst from 12,74 €

After over 15 years as Kreidler drummer and a number of other guest appearances, Thomas Klein now presents his first solo album under the name SØLYST. The basic ingredients of his music do not differ greatly from Kreidler’s. SØLYST also unites analogue drums and electronically generated patterns. But Klein now heads into more tribalistic territory. The beat, the groove, the monotones—Klein is a musical hypnotist, taking aim at rhythmic ecstasy with minimal, yet highly effective means. Both restrained and insistent, SØLYST’s darkly pulsating aural cosmos envelops the listener and holds him fast as a fantastic voyage commences. Intricate, repetitive sequences, overflowing delays—and the drums, always the drums, sometimes in the mix, sometimes alone in acoustic space, as they unleash mesmerising physical and atmospheric energy, the heart of the instrumental pieces. Afrobeat, minimal music, Krautrock, dub, cosmic—all apposite and well-intended references, but not enough by way of explanation. A genre to encompass this has yet to be invented, so Tribal Dub Krautrock is perhaps the most fitting description.

Qluster - Rufen 17,99 €

"Rufen" is the second instalment in a trilogy of Qluster music, following on from the "Fragen" studio album. In four impressive live recordings, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Onnen Bock unfold aural panoramas which can only be described, in the truest sense of the word, as fantastic.

Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters - Underrated Silence from 12,74 €

Ulrich Schnauss, master of shoegazer indietronica, and Mark Peters, bass player, guitarist and songwriter in the British band Engineers, present their first collaboration: They have crafted music which is enchanting in the truest sense of the word, shimmering sounds, floating echoes, rhythmically reverberant chords which wrap themselves around the listener, lifting him into a state of suspension and carrying him gently away.

Kluster - Klopfzeichen 17,99 €

Kluster was a short-lived project of three musicians/artists/performers: Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Konrad Schnitzler. They recorded two albums with Conny Plank in 1970, unprecedented in their experimental radicalism. Chaotic, apocalyptic (noise) improvisations (a sound later termed industrial), enriched with recited lyrics in places. The trio split up not long afterwards. Exchanging the K for a C, Roedelius and Moebius continued as a duo under the name of Cluster, whilst Conrad Schnitzler went solo. "Klopfzeichen" was the most radical album of the early German pop music avant-garde by a country mile. Its sounds and noises had nothing in common with the sequencer-generated electronic music emerging from Berlin or Düsseldorf. Kluster music was Angstmusik, the music of fear.

Moebius & Tietchens - Moebius & Tietchens from 12,74 €

With Asmus Tietchens and Dieter Moebius, two artists counting among the greats of German avant-garde electronic music have come together. Both have been active for well over thirty years: Moebius (since 1970) as a member of Kluster/Cluster and Harmonia, as well as solo and in numerous collaborations (Brian Eno, Mani Neumeier, Conny Plank, Mayo Thompson and many more), and Tietchens (since 1979) almost exclusively as a solo artist, beginning in the fields of electronic music and musique concréte and later mainly in the realm of abstract music. "Moebius+Tietchens" is now their first collaboration in 32 years.

Kreidler - DEN from 13,49 €

It could be said that TANK – Kreidler's critically acclaimed previous album –is a drum album. Not in the sense of the brute force of a Ginger Baker or a John Bonham, but more in terms of the elastic muscularity of a Budgie, a Robert Görl or a Klaus Dinger. So in the case of DEN, if attempting yet another such broad categorization, one might draw attention to the album's viscous musicality. Indeed, for recording and mixing, Kreidler chose to work at LowSwing, a studio renowned for its round sonic character, with the magnificent Guy Sternberg at the controls.

The album's opening track SUN displays an inspired beauty that is perhaps reminiscent of Eno during those periods in which he was interested in songwriting. Pan-Asian counter-melodies interplay around the stoic but light architecture of DEADWRINGER. And ROTE WÜSTE is a mysterious painting, spanning a vast emotional arc between it's dark beginnings and the possibility of a conciliatory resolution. The heavily grooving CASCADE finds an utterly mesmerized Alex Paulick on guitar – just how many chord changes does Andreas Reihse get through? But one nice aspect of Kreidler is that those kinds of things hardly matter. Kreidler never burden the listener with strict didacticism. Everything flows naturally. MOTH RACE is another uninhibited dance number built on Detlef Weinrich's harsh yet supple beat, suggesting New York City as envisioned by Arthur Russell. CELTIC GHOSTS dissolves this impression through ornamentation and leads us out onto the glassy ice… WINTER is a gliding machine of magnetic, polished chrome – self-reflective. A rhythmic firework commences – devoid of all morality? Perhaps… Or rather, beyond such categories. Maybe its just the view through the window. Not a promise, but a look ahead.

The band has said that they were initially considering making a record without any drums. Fortunately, they did not follow through with that idea. Thomas Klein's playing is an essential component of the Kreidler sound. And if any reference is missing here, then it might be to Jaki Liebezeit of Can, who cultivates a similarly angular groove. All in all, in addition to the musical subtlety and elegant dialogical interaction which is celebrated on Kreidler's new album DEN, it can be stated with enthusiasm that the band has not taken a single step back from its rhythmic force.

PS: The cover art is the work of the artist Enrico David. The visual ideas of Surrealism merge with contemporary trivial and popular culture in his very direct works, which often employ traditional techniques. Enrico David was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009.

Schneider TM - Construction Sounds from 17,99 €

This is what results when a delicate musician has to live amidst Berlin's construction noise for eight years, during the time when the former working class district of Prenzlauer Berg was transformed into a neighborhood for higher-income earners. With his latest album "Construction Sounds" Dirk Dresselhaus aka Schneider TM processes that time, when he was surrounded by constant clatter, noise, sawing, drilling, hammering, chipping, etc. It happened like this: While improvising at home with his electronic equipment, Dresselhaus at some point noticed that his music was increasingly beginning to imitate the sounds and structures of the construction site noise that surrounded him daily for up to 15 hours
at a time and periodically brought him to the brink of a nervous breakdown.
Perhaps as a kind of defense mechanism, he began to record the sounds and patterns produced by the construction workers and their machines, and even began to have fun in doing so. Gradually he had the feeling that the workers, whether consciously or unconsciously, were using their tools much like musical instruments, even interacting, as if they were producing improvised music.
"Construction Sounds" combines these moments with the electronic recordings that Dresselhaus made during this period. He only minimally processed the recordings, as he wanted to make "those beautiful moments, generated by unknown construction workers, which I sometimes even heard as cosmic music" available to a wider audience as faithfully as possible. Under no circumstances should one confuse "Construction Sounds" with industrial music, which either uses conventional instruments to sound like factory noise (like Kluster in 1970) or uses industrial noises as mere atmospheric or rhythmic additions to music made using instruments, as Einstürzende Neubauten did in the early 80's. For Dresselhaus, the sounds of construction are the music itself

Important: This album is not a statement, it's just beautiful music. Anyone delving into these sounds will experience it much like Dresselhaus: From the cacophony, a symphony.

Palais Schaumburg - Palais Schaumburg from 20,99 €

The influential German band Palais Schaumburg has reunited in the classic lineup. Since its release in 1981, their debut album has remained in a league of its own:
fleet-footed and peculiar, abstract and pop, amateurish and savvy, it showed real alternatives to the then-pervasive crude search for identity found in the "New German Wave". The band, which consisted entirely of divergent personalities, has reunited in this formation to rediscover their common ground, further develop, and to perform live.

Their few recent live concerts in Berlin, Cologne, and Tokyo were met with rapturous reception – and not only from those in their own age group. In this post-sampling era, with the current, dynamic changes in the creation and reception of music, their statement has lost none of its fascination. Anyone who sees and hears the combination of idiosyncratic bass riffs (Blunck), bizarre yet catchy rhythms (Hertwig, Blunck), Fehlmann's shrill horn and synthesizer fanfares, and Hiller's seemingly atonal staccato guitar work and oblique lyrical conglomerates, will immediately comprehend the influence of this band.

Therefore, we are very pleased to reissue the important original works of Palais Schaumburg in an appropriate and extended format. What do we mean by that? Well, in addition to the actual album, this reissue includes a second CD/LP containing all the pieces that the band recorded prior to their debut album (all of them now for the first time on CD), and a previously unreleased recording of a concert in Holland. The limited edition 180 gram vinyl double LP additionally contains a single with four tracks from a concert in Hamburg where people from the audience – among them Andreas Dorau – perform their own versions accompanied by the band. A lavish booklet includes rare photographs and liner notes by Chris Bohn, editor of the British music magazine "The Wire".

Moebius & Plank - En Route from 17,99 €

„En Route“ was created in 1986, when the era of analogue synths and rhythm machines seemed to be drawing to a close. Drum computers, samplers and digital instruments such as the Synclavier and Fairlight CMS would shape the immediate future of electronic music. Naturally, these wonderful machines formed a part of Plank’s arsenal and were used extensively by him and Moebius. The duo explored the new devices with their inimitable, cheerful sense of abandon, but were wiseenough not to rely on them entirely. Analogue instruments resurface time and again, such as trumpet (!), guitar and other sonic sources which are less easy to identify. Nor had Moebius packed his analogue synthesizers away in mothballs.

Rhythmic throughout, the music is wholly free of the darkness which characterized the fashionable industrial or new wave scenes of the period. A tendency to descend into enraptured sonic abstraction is similarly absent. The pieces almost sound as if they are the product of real-time improvisation – airy and self-evident, ballast-free of and without unnecessary embellishment. Moebius and Plank must have had so much fun during the recording sessions! „En Route“ is hip electronic music, yet it steers well clear of the mainstream. The fact that three tracks were remixed for a commission by Dave Stewart (Eurythmics) did nothing to change that. Stewart was planning a film project (which never came to fruition) and hired producer Manu Guiot, who reshaped the tracks together with Dieter Moebius shortly before release in Conny's studio.

Moebius and Plank were en route, “on the way" so to speak. A damned fine way at that. Sadly, “En Route” was to be the last in a sequence of five albums they recorded and released together. Conceived in 1983, “Ludwig’s Law” was the fourth album in chronological terms but only appeared in 1998, three years after “En Route”. Debilitated by severe illness, Plank was no longer able to mix the recordings himself. His studio colleague Bruno Gebhard took on the task, together withMoebius. Shortly afterwards, in 1987, Conny Plank died. The common path of the two friends was now at an end. But “En Route” was certainly not intended to mark the conclusion of their lengthy collaboration. For how much of the future, how much optimism were implicit in the certitude of being en route?

Asmus Tietchens

Karl Bartos - Off The Record from 14,24 €

CD version includes a 40 page booklet! Vinyl version including CD.
Karl Bartos' new album is an audio-visual sensation! Lost for many years, some of his early music has been reconceived and re-contextualised in a thrilling modern setting. Here's the story: during Kraftwerk's heyday Karl Bartos wrote - off the record - a secret acoustic diary. Based on his musical jottings - rhythms, riffs, hooks, sounds, chords and melodies - this is what he has come up with today: twelve brand new, exciting, timeless songs.
For Off the Record , Karl Bartos has opened up his music archive for the very first time. He rediscovered and analysed hundreds of tapes, piles of sheet music, and years of digital media. Inspired by his acoustic diary and adding his experience as a composer and producer, he has created twelve brand new songs - written and performed with masterly skill.
It took him two years to accomplish this original Bartos album: iron crystal music, vocoder newspeak, robot sounds, digital glitch, techno pop, catchy melodies, electronic avant-garde, roaring silence, futurism, and, of course, those rhythms! Rhythms of brutal minimalistic impact as found on the much-sampled Numbers recorded three decades ago and described by Mike Banks of Underground Resistance as "the secret code of electronic funk."

Solyst - Lead from 17,99 €

The second album by KREIDLER drummer THOMAS KLEIN – alias SØLYST – is a hypnotic journey into the heart of darkness. Foreboding synth patterns, menacing bass lines, driving drum figures, cavernous percussion effects: SØLYST delves into new depths with his TRIBAL KRAUT DUB.

Ten pieces are collected on "Lead". The first of these, "Pierbourg", rolls into the unknown with stoic determination, as if feeling its way through an indefinable darkness to leave its mark. A fierce, stomping beat drives straight ahead, unperturbed, leaving no doubt as to its decisiveness. Drums, percussion, synth patterns, delays and skeletal, sparse fragments of melodies characterize the sound over the next 40 minutes. The album docks onto the sonic universe of its predecessor, yet the sound is somewhat clearer and more polished. After a number of euphoric and more relaxed moments, with driving and pulsating pieces of springy lightness and leaden heaviness, the journey ends with "Schnee". The pressure dissolves into a hypnotic, relaxed movement, finding a moderate rhythm, and turns its gaze toward the stars.

The physical, with all kinds of percussion, remains essential with SØLYST. Through its conception and implementation, "Lead" demonstrates just how the scope of this physicality can
be explored. Klein's use of drums and percussion becomes a living, driving, urgent source of energy. But the rudimentary melodies and the overall atmosphere are also shaped in large part by the drums. The range of moods alternates between a supercool distance and heated immediacy. Like the different aggregate states of a single substance, the drumming constantly changes its form, and thus its role.

The electronic sounds and sequences are run through chains of delays to become dynamic, strongly emotional structures. These are met with the exceptional drumming of Thomas Klein, whose instrument often becomes the actual protagonist. However, the focus is never on ability or virtuosity, but on the tension between these two interlocking components and their extremely lively interaction. The way the acoustic drums and electronic sounds seem to connect, combat and combine is the special, exciting, thrilling aspect of "Lead“!